Gymvisibility

One thing I really, really hate about going to the gym is the possibility of seeing someone I know there. Or, rather, the possibility of someone I know seeing me there.

While I genuinely enjoy unexpectedly meeting up with friends anywhere else, I prefer to not see them at the gym. You see, anywhere else I can wear clothes that hide my flab and reveal only the toned portions of my body. Unfortunately, exercise clothes don't give me that option.

Even more than the clothes, though, the number one reason I try to avoid people I know at the gym is that they will know I'm human, that I have to work to look as good as I do (which, granted, isn't very). I'd rather people think I look good with no effort. It would be so much less...humiliating.

I'm afraid gym invisibility has become somewhat of an obsession with me. Living in a small town with only one exercise facility certainly has its drawbacks. Lately, I've been going to extreme measures to avoid being seen there.

For instance, the other day I was happily chugging away on the elliptical when I spied (with my little eye) an acquaintance working out on the stair-stepper. Immediately, I could feel myself shrink inside and I stopped right away, making a bee-line for the door, not minding the fact that my gym bag and car keys were still in the locker room. For the next half-hour I crouched between two cars, keeping an eye on the door to watch for my acquaintance to emerge.

When she finally came out, I breathed a sigh of relief. Now I could finally go back inside and finish my routine. Unfortunately, she began walking in the direction of my hideout and I realized that she must have gotten a new car, one that I was hiding next to at that very moment. I could either stand up and reveal myself or try to sneak around to the other side of the black car.

I decided to stand up and walk casually away. Maybe she wouldn't notice me.

"Hey!" she called out. I turned and waved at her. She continued. "It's so..." she looked at me and her features began to contort into an expression of disgust - but she controlled them quickly. "...It's so good to see you again!"

She was lying. I knew she was lying.

I ran home, humiliated, and buried my head under my pillows. I doubt I'll ever have the courage to go to a gym again.

A Morning Walk.

Welcome! Thank you for joining us on today’s jog. Please keep your hands and feet close to your body at all times, as excess motion may result in collision with passing objects. Begin by sending action potentials to your left leg muscles. Your appendage should flex so as to boost itself from the ground. Use the liquid in your ears to balance on one lower limb - you don't want to collapse on the concrete. Now set your shoe down a few feet in front of where you lifted it from.

Proceed with the same method for the second leg. Repeat. Speed up the process and continue to reiterate the system. Use your upper limbs to maintain equilibrium, swinging them back and forth like pendulums.

So now you need to breathe.

Open your mouth and take care that your tonsils are not in the way. Use your lower diaphragm muscles to expand your lungs, creating a vacuum and sucking atmosphere into your chest cavity. Be careful not to inhale any passing insects. After the oxygen has been absorbed by your lungs, use your abdominal muscles to exhale.

Congratulations! You have crossed the street. Please join us next week when we eat a cheeseburger!

Ultimate Fighter (Part 2)

Continued from Part 1

His Toughness noticed me looking and put down his weights. Even though he was several paces away, I felt genuinely nervous as he started toward me. As a gym novice, I was unsure if I had violated some "don't look" rule of weight rooms. Men's restrooms had such prohibitions—why shouldn't another enclave of incubated testosterone?

He introduced himself with the name "Tito," and I mumbled my name. He nodded. The pause that followed was awkward—if you graphed a line showing how people handle awkward moments, I would be at the zenith of the line. So I started studying Tito's tattoos.

The tattoo on Tito's right shoulder was an intricate collection of colors and shapes that I couldn't understand. It looked as if a sixth grader had drawn a picture only to have his little sister scribble it out and do something else on the same piece of paper. Perhaps this process was repeated several times. On his left shoulder, a very bold five pointed star in solid black was pasted slightly off center. It looked like he had been inked at a very young age and the skin had floated off center over the years.

Tito must have been at the nadir of the arc, because he looked disgruntled by the pause. I, however, was very gruntled and asked an intelligent question:

"So what line of work are you in, Tito?" This was the question Tito had been waiting for. His whole demeanor changed into that of a proud school boy's and I thought for a brief instant that this might have been what he was like when he got the star tattoo.

"I am an Ultimate Fighter, kid." Tito proceeded to tell me all about ultimate fighting, the sport which had honed his body and which he proclaimed with his body art.

Take the roman gladiators, subtract the sharp objects, blunt weapons and shields, change the venue from the Amphitheater Flavium to a metal cage and add steroids. If you did the math right, you have ultimate fighting. It's a really daring activity that attracts the imaginations of teenagers and gives washed up boxers a way to get back on Pay-Per-View. I was hooked.

The more Tito talked, the more I was amazed that he still had all his teeth. Then he told me a story about how he lost the majority in a single punch and how this happened twice and that the pair he had now was actually his third set of orthodontic stand-ins. His left eye was made of glass, his right leg had so much metal it qualified under some definitions as a prosthetic limb and he was missing a finger. I hadn't noticed the finger until then.

Tito taught me how to punch. Sure, I'd seen people get hit in the Matrix Movies, but when Tito hit the punching bag the bag gave the sort of deflated sound you would expect to hear from an opponent after a knockout blow. I think now that I am an even more dangerous person than Tito, because now I know just enough to start a fight. At least Tito can end a fight.

Tito was like a sports talk radio personality without the standard English vocabulary, but with much more colorful language. He talked about the history, ethics, problems and opportunities of fighting. He billed several upcoming fights and warned me about the dangers of overtraining. And he never talked about anything else. He never asked questions and never deviated from his topic of interest. I thought Tito must be a dream date.

Tito had stopped lifting and was talking to me as I worked the leg press, the bicep curl, the assisted dip and chin up, the pecs pusher, the triceps pull, the hamstring twist and the quadriceps tear. He was even by my side as I cooled down on the treadmill. In fact, with the exception of his punching bag attack, he hadn't done anything that would qualify as an exertion in the entire hour he had followed me around.

When my workout was over, Tito left as well, presumably to go visit another gym and continue his "workout."

UPDATE: Tito was in a fight this weekend. He was knocked out in 35 seconds. His opponent pulled out a tattoo gun and added some marks to Tito's right shoulder while he was out. I understand now why it looks so ugly.

Ultimate Fighter (Part 1)

I went to the gym. I do that sometimes, more to meet women than work out. Calorie burning is a welcome side effect and, ironically enough, can help me meet more women. So I go to the gym.

So I was at the gym. Specifically, I went to the weight room. The weight room is where the jocks and wannabe jocks congregate to flex and admire their own bodies as they strain against dangerously heavy resistance. Jocks like weight rooms because they make them feel superior and stronger. I like weight rooms because I am a jock wannabe.

So I was in the weight room. Specifically, I was at the bench press, getting ready to work my spindly limbs into a sweat. The bench press is the machine of choice for jocks, because it provides a bright-line of achievement. Can you bench your weight? Can you bench five stone? These are questions that are answered in the weight room and lied about outside of it.

I knew a guy once who had a nasty scar across his chest from where the bench press fell while he was trying to out-press another guy. The way I heard it, the injury was the result of an impromptu bench pressing competition before the gym outlawed such gratuitous displays of arm firepower. He had insisted on lifting without a spotter to show the "outstanding strength" of his rotator cuff. Apparently something had failed, and the bar had sunk lower than the lifter expected. The three hundred odd pounds (the number probably gets bigger with each retelling) had nearly crushed the lifter's lung and his rotator cuff was on its third surgery. The scars were pretty cool, though...

Across from me, at the bicep curl, a thin young man sporting a tight white shirt with the name of a rock group pasted over the front quickly moved a light weight up and down before pulling back his shirt to reveal a knotted and very small bicep. Rock Star was not distracting and I returned to the bench press.

That's when I noticed a short, heavily tattooed jock in the far corner of the gym. A stout gentleman, he appeared to be around nine stone and wore his weight with corded muscle over a short frame. His face showed tough features, a cauliflower ear and a Tom Cruise nose. I watched as he hoisted impossibly heavy weights over his head and worked his already bulked shoulder muscles with a common motion but extraordinary resolve. Wow.

To be continued...

"I'll just work it off tonight"

I just left a particular well known sandwich franchise that serves all manner of bread and meat combinations in "submarine" style sandwiches. I am reticent to name the franchise because to do so might constitute libel and render FCN vulnerable to a lawsuit that could result in the loss of all of its meager resources to the ensuing litigation. I will, however, tell you that the restaurant has over 30,000 locations in some 87 countries and was named the #1 Franchise in 2009 by a really fat fast food connoisseur. I'll also tell you that the company has ads featuring "Jared" who dropped a bunch of weight by "eating fresh." Oh, what the heck, you have it figured out by now. It's Subway. So go ahead and sue us Fred DeLuca. I read about your innovative business strategy in my economics class, but Fortune 400 members don't scare me. Well, most of them don't. These two guys (here and here) look a tad scary. But Fred, go ahead and try to take us down!
So there I was - at Subway - about to order the least healthy thing on the menu. Subway puts unhealthy things on the menu so that we guys can go there for lunch, scarf down a thousand or so quick calories and show our moms the partially redacted receipt so they will be proud of our health-conscious decision. Meanwhile our moms don't understand when we try to make health-conscious decisions at In-N-Out.

But whatever. This post is about neither our moms nor Fred DeLuca. It's about two middle aged women who entered the subway after me looking disheveled - as if they just returned from promenade. There is no polite way of saying this. These women were overweight. They were fat. They looked like contestants in the first week of "Biggest Loser." Okay, maybe the third week. They were corpulent, fleshy, obese, overblown, procine, portly and stout. They suffered from gut overflow, they overstocked the adipose tissue, they were ready for winter, they were running a surplus, they were a nightmare in a 2-piece, they were oleaginous and unctuous in the storage area. And I do mean that with all respect, because there is no nice way of saying it. None at all.

We'll call them Rosalie and Carol, for no particular reason.

Rosalie told Carol that she had eaten a burrito and a donut (or is it a doughnut?) for breakfast and that she wasn't that hungry. Carol confied in Rosalie that she had eaten a box of oreo cookies and a whole box of taquitos for breakfast and that she didn't have a big appetite either. I had eaten a burrito, donut, and a box of taquitos that day, but I didn't say anything.

Both entered the store complaining about the walk across the parking lot, a complaint I found dumbfounding given the gorgeous day outside. In fact, I was planning on eating my sandwich outdoors in order to take advantage of the sunlight and catch some unprotected ultraviolet rays. I know, I live dangerously.

When Rosalie and Carol ordered my distracted interest turned into focused attentiveness. They both commanded footlong sandwiches with everything. And they sat down in the store to eat their caloric feast. Carol told Rosalie that she would "just work it off tonight" a promise that rang hollow.

It rang hollow because she didn't like walking across a parking lot on a gorgeous day. It rang hollow because she couldn't possibly work off all the food she'd eaten that day unless the "work" was done by a licensed plastic surgeon. It rang hollow because health is a lifestyle and habit - it isn't a twenty minute decision before dinner. Dang, that was painful to type.

Anyway, in case you think we're picking on those who lack self control just for the heck of it, know that the only thing separating us from Rosalie and Carol is a few years. We'll get there eventually...and when we do, we'll be ready to confess.

Flaunt Those Curves, part one

Fitness clubs are scary places. They're advertised as the place to go to lose weight or "get in shape," but the truth is that everyone at a gym is already in shape and ready to look askance at those who dare arrive with an unhealthy body. Every time I step foot in one of those places, I feel intimidated by the lean, mean, muscle machine men, not to mention the women doing reps with 20-lb barbells.

I can hear them mentally sizing me up: "Look at that dweeb; I bet he can't even walk a mile without getting out of breath and I could snap him in two in one try. What's a guy like that doing here?"

Between the men who look down on me for my excess insulation and puny muscles and the women with whom I know I don't have a dream of ever having a chance, I feel that gyms are a hostile environment for people like me. Unfortunately, people like me also need to exercise in order to become like people like them. Also, I've heard that being physically fit helps to attract the opposite sex, something I need a lot of help with.

This in mind, I wracked my brain trying to think of a solution. A few weeks ago, I found one. "Aha!" my brain said, "I will join Curves; I can burn 500 calories in 30 minutes and the women there aren't terribly fit. Plus, they have low self-esteem, evidenced by the fact that they go to a place that caters to women, enabling them to get fit without damaging their image with men who go to real gyms."

I knew this would work great. I could become a lean, mean, muscle machine man while picking up women at the same time. The next day, I happily drove to the local Curves, which was only about a block away. I parked my car and walked through the open door.

Am imposing looking woman who might have had an elephant for an uncle sat at a desk and eyed me warily. "What are you doing here, young man?" she asked in a none-too-gentle tone, giving me the impression that she didn't want my business. I considered backing away and coming up with a plan "B," but I had thought too long to give up so easily. I opened my mouth to begin to speak.

To be continued...